strategy

Sometimes it’s better when the bad guys win. Sure, everyone is pulling for the hero to defeat the villain, but a more intriguing alternative occurs when evil triumphs over good. Look atEmpire Strikes Backor the beginning of Days of Futures Past. The concept sets up compelling premises and it’s the same one at the heart of XCOM 2.

The game throws players into the year 2035, where they quickly learn that the aliens are victorious. XCOM failed to fend off the invasion and are driven underground while the extra terrestrials establish a foothold on Earth. They build cities that lure residents with the promise of safety and technological advances, but the aliens have an ulterior motive, said creative director Jake Solomon. That’s partly what Central and XCOM team members are investigating during the tutorial mission that introduces several new concepts to combat.Continue Reading →

This is an old screenshot from the game in 2010. The rest of the photos below are from the 2011 E3 demo.

A lot can change in a year. The last time I saw XCOM at E3 2010, the game looked more like a shooter that the successor to one of the most acclaimed strategy games of all time. All the planning and tactics happened before the mission. It’s in how you choose which objective to take or what new alien weapon to research. The strategy element seemed light.

Fast-forward 12 months later and XCOM has done a complete 180. At E3, it looks as though 2K Marin went back to the drawing board and came up with a project that’s truer to its predecessors. The developers said that their initial take XCOM was too much in their comfort zone. The team that developed Bioshock 2 said it was too much like that game. This time around, it’s still a first-person shooter, but now, there’s more of a focus on using strategy in actual combat.

After watching this R.U.S.E. touch-screen table, I’ve discovered that I really, really need one. Of all the demos I’ve seen at E3, this was one of the more impressive ones. If this touch-screen R.U.S.E. were in the arcades, I’d consider paying 75 cents to $1 for a match. It looks like a hell of a game.

“Unit 1, Secure, Bravo.” There, I just moved a squad of soldiers to a base. “Unit 2, Camera.” Now, I have a view of the battlefield from my attack helicopters. “Unit 3 …” I sound like a complete nerd. I’m commanding imaginary troops on an imaginary battlefield. I bark out orders, but they’re going to no one. It’s just my voice going through a program and the tiny men on screen reacting.

But despite this fact, the effect works well. You feel like a supreme commander, directing your troops into battle. The voice control gives Tom Clancy’s EndWar the same type of immersion factor that Guitar Hero had. And like Harmonix’s breakthrough title, it’s the new control scheme can either make or break the title.

The voice-control will have to overcome two factors. The first obstacle is a practical one. The technology has to work. Commanding your troops has to be quick and immediate and when I was doing it at UbiDays, it was all right. The troops moved about 80 percent of the time. The other 20 percent was trouble. EndWar especially stumbled during the “deploy” command as in “Unit 1, deploy, tanks.”

When I said the syntax, it didn’t work. The publicist next to me chalked it up to the ambient noise around the area and showed me that players can use the controller to pick a command, but it’s still better to use your voice to set things in motion.

The other hurdle facing EndWar is the nerd factor. When I told my brother that I bought Guitar Hero, he said that was the dorkiest thing ever. He equated it with karaoke or something worse — air guitar — but after playing it, he changed his mind. It’s this sort of mind-set that the game will ahve trouble overcoming. Yelling out commands to a video game is a lot like talking to yourself. From a stranger’s perspective, you can look crazy so suffice to say this isn’t going to be something you play with friends.

But if EndWar can succeed in both areas (and it possibly could), we could be looking at the rarest of things: a great console RTS.